TORONTO — The Toronto Raptors are not a very good basketball team, at least if the standard of very good is a team where 50 regular-season wins is a given and anything short of winning at least one playoff series would be considered a disappointment.
That’s not being negative, that’s just the reality when for a team coming off 25- and 30-win seasons, with one playoff appearance in the last five years, and none in the past three years.
And the Raptors are hardly alone. By the above standard, there are really only eight or nine very good teams across the 30-team league, and perhaps just three in the Eastern Conference.
The Raptors might end up being good, or at least pretty good, and on Wednesday I catalogued five reasons to be optimistic about why they could be a good bet to exceed expectations — oddsmakers have their over-under win total at 37.5 — and maybe even be a surprise playoff contender in the East.
But then again, the sharps in Vegas don’t stay in business by being wrong all the time. There is a reason the Raptors are considered a long shot to be even a .500 team, let alone to finish in the top six in the East and earn a guaranteed playoff spot.
You can see the good with the Raptors, but there are reasons for concern as well.
Among them:
1. Shooting must improve: It’s been more than 20 years since Steve Nash and the Phoenix Suns introduced the NBA to the effectiveness of high-tempo offence, an open floor and elite shooting, and a decade since Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors perfected it. By this stage, having at least three legitimate deep-shooting threats on the floor is almost mandatory, four is better, and five is better still. Most of the Raptors’ best projected lineup configurations will struggle to have two proven NBA deep threats on the floor, which is no surprise because they have only two players on their roster — Immanuel Quickley and Brandon Ingram — who have had seasons when they’ve made threes at a better-than-league-average rate on more than five attempts a game.
If you squint, you can see where additional shooting might come from. Jamison Battle and Ochai Agbaji both had excellent seasons from deep last year, connecting on 40.5 and 39.9 per cent of their attempts, but neither projects to be in the top eight of the rotation. Gradey Dick was drafted because of his ability to shoot, especially off movement, but he connected on just 35 per cent of his threes last season. There’s no getting around that Scottie Barnes and RJ Barrett are high-usage players who don’t scare defences from behind the arc, as they come into the season carrying career averages of 30 per cent and 34.6 per cent, respectively. The Raptors hope an emphasis on transition offence, and passing and movement in the half-court, can mitigate what is an obvious flaw, but everything would work much better if they shot the ball better than their roster suggests.
2. Too much of a good thing: One of the Raptors’ challenges this season is that so much of their roster features players with overlapping strengths and weaknesses, rather than complementary ones. Ingram is at his best as a face-up, ball-handling wing, but so is Barnes, and Barrett would certainly consider that as one of his primary attributes. Can they all co-exist effectively, given the limited spacing on the roster?
Similarly, the Raptors have no shortage of big wings or small-ball centre types who are so critical to how they want to play defence: high up the floor and with multiple players who can switch and cover ball handlers on the perimeter. Jonathan Mogbo, Collin Murray-Boyles and Sandro Mamukelashvili would all qualify, and certainly Barnes is more than capable of also playing that role. But none of that group shoots well, which creates spacing issues and, practically speaking, makes it hard to play more than one or two of them at a time.
And then there is a bit of a traffic jam among Dick, Agbaji, Ja’Kobe Walter, Battle and even AJ Lawson for the limited minutes available at shooting guard. Having too many choices is better than not enough, but that position overall, combined with the Raptors’ lack of shooting, might make it difficult to maximize a roster that has decent — if not overwhelming — talent, top to bottom.
3. Can chemistry last? The vibes the Raptors enjoyed last season were real. It was one of the most engaged and upbeat 30-win teams you will ever find in professional sports. There were multiple reasons for that: one is the environment created by head coach Darko Rajakovic and his staff; another is that there are a lot of good citizens on the roster among the veterans, and a true brotherhood among the youngsters, with Jamal Shead emerging as a positive connective force. But another factor is that as the season went along, and injuries knocked so many veterans and regulars out of the rotation, there was enough playing time to go around for everyone, doubly so when the mission shifted explicitly to development rather than, say, chasing 10th place and the final play-in spot. An astonishing 19 players averaged at least 16 minutes a game. It was a paradise for young players, with plenty of minutes and starts to go around for everyone.
That can’t be the case this season if the Raptors are going to compete for a playoff spot, and for the first time in his career as an NBA head coach, Rajakovic will have to make some hard decisions on roles and playing time. Inevitably, that will leave some players wanting more, which can create tension or, at the very least, make it hard to keep the good vibes going.
4. There is only one Jakob Poeltl: I mean this literally and figuratively. Poeltl is the only Austrian in the NBA, but he’s also the only player on the Raptors roster capable of being a starting centre. That’s not a unique problem — finding one legitimate NBA big is hard enough; having two capable bigs on your roster is an even more significant challenge. But in the Raptors’ case, it’s not just that their backup centre isn’t very good; it’s that they don’t have one at all. That’s a significant reason the Raptors were 6-40 without Poeltl in the lineup between Jan. 7, 2024, and Feb. 25, 2025. They were 7-5 when he sat out games down the stretch after that, but most of that success came against teams that were more committed to losing than the Raptors were. A brief absence can probably be managed around, but if Poeltl is injured for any significant length of time, it’s hard to imagine the Raptors being anything more than a play-in team.
As an aside, the Raptors’ lack of depth at point guard could be an issue, too. Shead was a great story in his rookie season, exceeding expectations as a second-round pick, but expecting him to excel as the only other true point guard on the roster could be a big ask.
5. Behind the 8-ball early: A lot of off-season optimism around the Raptors stems from the fact that this group finished last season with a 22-21 record after an 8-31 start and were — statistically, at least — the NBA’s third-best defence over that 43-game sample after being the third worst in their first 39 games. But having the NBA’s most difficult schedule to start the season and the easiest to finish had a big influence on those numbers. Of the Raptors’ 22 wins in the second half, 13 of them came against the six teams that finished behind them in the overall NBA standings. Conversely, the Raptors were 9-34 on the season against teams with a .500 record or better for the year, which is one reason they were so bad early in the season when playing a front-loaded schedule.
Well, the bad news is the Raptors’ schedule is front-loaded again, although not as significantly as last season, with the tepid level of competition in the Eastern Conference having a lot to do with that. Still, the Raptors’ first nine games are against teams that are projected to be in the playoffs this season. Things normalize somewhat after that, but the flip side is that Toronto’s second half won’t offer as many soft spots as last season, with the two longest road trips coming in January and March. In the end, the Raptors’ destiny relies on them getting the wins they need when they have to have them, but they will have their mettle tested early, and they won’t be able to coast late.
